In order to design a multi-Gbps wireless communication system, efforts to use a 60 GHz frequency band are maid mainly by adoption of a large unlicensed frequency band. The use of this can support an application program requiring a high bandwidth, such as uncompressed high-definition (HD) multimedia.
Current multi-antenna wireless communication systems are based on a digital beamforming (DBF) scheme in a low carrier frequency band (5 GHz). In this structure, each antenna has its own analog front end (AFE) chain, and each AFE chain performs a conversion between a digital baseband domain and an analog radio frequency (RF) domain. Also, a transmitter includes a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and a receiver includes an analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
In a 60 GH band, a wireless communication system may have 8 or more antenna sets, but a digital beamforming scheme is not practically viable due to high cost and large power consumption required in an AFE.
In addition, a mixed antenna selection (AS)/DBF scheme for solving this problem also does not provide a gain by an antenna set or beamforming, thus leading to large performance degradation.